If it comes as a shock to anyone that at some point in the grip of a decades-long addiction to pills, booze and crack cocaine the essentially heterosexual Charlie Sheen occasionally “turned over the menu” and had sex with men, then I am delighted. I did not know such pockets of naivety could still exist in this benighted world. You sweet things. Enjoy your time!
That this is the fact that has made headlines (the few there have been) around the release of the two-part documentary AKA Charlie Sheen is testimony to how little new information there is in it. How, really, could it be otherwise? Every one of the three acts – which in the film he labels “Partying”, “Partying with problems” and “Just problems” – of his adult life has been comprehensively documented by the media in real time. Sometimes that was via stories sold by the people he partied with, sometimes via public hospitalisations and press conferences called by his father Martin Sheen to try to control the press interest. Sometimes it was thanks to Charlie’s own interviews or call-ins to the likes of Alex Jones’s Infowars shows, or ranting videos posted on YouTube about his “tiger blood” and “Adonis DNA” done under the influence, or as a result of the drawn-out divorce proceedings between him and Denise Richards as his substance abuse made their life together untenable. And sometimes it was an amalgam, as when in 2015 he gave an exclusive interview to NBC’s Today show revealing his HIV+ status, to end various extortion attempts people had made over the four years since his diagnosis.
Martin Sheen and Charlie’s brother Emilio Estevez declined to participate in the film. No one – including Charlie, as he says himself – can blame them. He is clear and it is clear that it is only because of his family’s enduring love that he is here to tell his tale at all. His other brother Ramon, however, is there, along with his daughter Lola, son Bob and their mothers – Richards and Brooke Mueller respectively, Charlie’s second and third wives. The women speak honestly and in Richards’ case very bracingly about him but still the love is clear.
You can see why. Charlie, now seven years sober, is inherently warm and effortlessly charming as he’s interviewed by film-maker Andrew Renzi. Likewise, in clips of him giving interviews early in his career, and in footage taken from the Sheen family videos, he and Emilio radiate charisma, too.
None of which, of course, means he wasn’t a monster when high. You don’t notice until afterwards how gentle a ride Renzi has given him, how lightly the accusations of domestic violence, the restraining orders, the parental failures and claims that he exposed girlfriends to HIV have been passed over, how much control over the narrative has been placed in Sheen’s hands. He pays what seems to be genuine homage to his family and friends’ patience and compassion – especially his childhood stalwart Tony Todd, who grew up with the Sheens as a neighbour, has never touched drugs or alcohol and nearly cries as he remembers nights at Charlie’s house during his hardest-partying years, hoping he wasn’t going to go into his bedroom the next morning and find him dead. But signs of true contrition, remorse or understanding of the suffering he must have put so many others through are increasingly conspicuous by their absence.
There is the odd moment when the glossy facade cracks. Most notably with Heidi Fleiss, the madam against whom Sheen, alone of her clients, testified in court. “The crybaby pussy bitch,” she says, still fibrillating with an almost refreshing rage. And there is Jon Cryer, Sheen’s co-star in Two and a Half Men, whose bone-deep weariness with “the cycle” the actor put the cast and crew through so many times over the years is still apparent. “He was having a tantrum,” he says of the binge Sheen went on after eventually being sacked from the show. “Because he had everything and then he lost it.”
There is too little self-examination on Sheen’s part here – and too many wistfully happy smiles as he remembers his partying days – for us to feel any sorrier for him than we do for those around him. Maybe he saves all that for his therapist and gives just the surface stuff to us. Let’s hope so. It would be the healthiest move he has made in his life.
• AKA Charlie Sheen is on Netflix now.
